Piper J. Daniels

Piper J. Daniels is the award-winning author of Ladies Lazarus (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2018). A Michigan native and queer intersectional feminist, Daniels holds a BA from Columbia College Chicago and an MFA from University of Washington and serves as a passionate advocate on issues of mental health, sexual assault, and body positivity. Her work appears in or is forthcoming from Hotel Amerika, The Rumpus, Tarpaulin Sky, Longreads, Enclave, The Dirty Spoon, The Monarch Review, and elsewhere. She lives in the American Southwest with her incredible partner, a coven of mischievous puppies, and a very stylish cat.

Piper J. Daniels

Piper J. Daniels is the award-winning author of Ladies Lazarus (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2018). A Michigan native and queer intersectional feminist, Daniels holds a BA from Columbia College Chicago and an MFA from University of Washington and serves as a passionate advocate on issues of mental health, sexual assault, and body positivity. Her work appears in or is forthcoming from Hotel Amerika, The Rumpus, Tarpaulin Sky, Longreads, Enclave, The Dirty Spoon, The Monarch Review, and elsewhere. She lives in the American Southwest with her incredible partner, a coven of mischievous puppies, and a very stylish cat.

Ladies Lazarusby Piper J. Daniels

Co-winner of the 2017 Tarpaulin Sky Press Book AwardsFinalist, Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ NonfictionLonglist, PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay

Equal parts séance, polemic, and love letter, Piper J. Daniels’ Ladies Lazarus examines evangelical upbringing, sexual trauma, queer identity, and mental illness with a raw intensity that moves between venom and grace. Fueled by wanderlust, Daniels travels the country, unearthing the voices of forgotten women. Girls and ghosts speak freely, murdered women serve as mentors, and those who’ve languished in unmarked graves convert their names to psalms. At every turn, Daniels invites the reader to engage, not in the soothing narrative of healing, but in the literal and metaphorical dynamism of death and resurrection.

Ladies Lazarusby Piper J. Daniels

Co-winner of the 2017 Tarpaulin Sky Press Book AwardsFinalist, Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ NonfictionLonglist, PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay

“Beautifully written collection of 11 lyric essays…. Daniels emerges as an empowering and noteworthy voice.” (Publishers Weekly) “Piper J. Daniels is going to rip the essay world apart. She’s the kind of writer who buries herself, lives among the dead, then comes to life again to levitate in the stormy air. Ladies Lazarus is the best debut I’ve read in a long time. Daniels has resurrected the personal essay and what it is and what it can do.” (Jenny Boully) “Piper J. Daniels writes, ‘Sometimes the only thing you can do with a feeling is lean into it.’ This is the nervy strategy of her first book, Ladies Lazarus, in which she not only explores her own battle with mental illness and suicidal ideation but also enters into a rich conversation with many other women writers. The result is an extremely intelligent, impressively understated, and achingly powerful work.” (David Shields) “Piper J. Daniels’ Ladies Lazarus is a siren song from planet woman, a love letter from the body, a resistance narrative against the dark.” (Lidia Yuknavitch)

“Beautifully written collection of 11 lyric essays…. Daniels emerges as an empowering and noteworthy voice.” (Publishers Weekly) “Piper J. Daniels is going to rip the essay world apart. She’s the kind of writer who buries herself, lives among the dead, then comes to life again to levitate in the stormy air. Ladies Lazarus is the best debut I’ve read in a long time. Daniels has resurrected the personal essay and what it is and what it can do.” (Jenny Boully) “Piper J. Daniels writes, ‘Sometimes the only thing you can do with a feeling is lean into it.’ This is the nervy strategy of her first book, Ladies Lazarus, in which she not only explores her own battle with mental illness and suicidal ideation but also enters into a rich conversation with many other women writers. The result is an extremely intelligent, impressively understated, and achingly powerful work.” (David Shields) “Piper J. Daniels’ Ladies Lazarus is a siren song from planet woman, a love letter from the body, a resistance narrative against the dark.” (Lidia Yuknavitch)

"Ladies Lazarus is an unapologetic work, so bitch and bad-ass, in the ways it uses beauty as a creative principle and transgressive force. It is the beauty that allows us to transform our shames into something usable...." -- Arisa White, VIDA

"What I finally understand is that the stories for and about people like us are not real. They are borne of fear and control. They are ghost stories authored by people who haven’t the courage to place their fingers upon the planchette, never mind open themselves to the apparition." -- Piper J. Daniels

We don't need to tell you that the last several months have been exceptionally brutal. Nor will we comment further, except to say it is in the context of this nationwide brutality that we read manuscripts for the 2017 TS Book Prizes.

An exceptional essay on demons, mental illness, self-harm, and suicide, which we're publishing just in time for Christmas. "If human life is an oath, then suicide for me was like an oath recited backwards, a protest against the physical body that gave entrance to that first strange and violent ghost and all that followed," writes Piper J. Daniels.